Chapter 3 #2
Nadia came the next week, sharp and efficient, running the spring festival planning with the brisk competence of someone who did not waste time on people she didn't respect, and she did not waste any on me either — invited me to the planning meeting, took my no for an initial answer, and then, three days later, showed up at the apiary with a folder of vendor logistics and said, without preamble, "I'm not here to convince you to come to a meeting.
I'm here because your supply chain touches four businesses in this town and nobody's ever mapped it properly, which is bad practice regardless of how you feel about meetings, so I mapped it myself and I wanted you to check it before I finalize the festival routes. "
I checked it. It was good work — better than good, genuinely thoughtful, accounting for delivery windows and cold-storage needs I hadn't expected an outsider to think of.
I told her so, grudgingly, and she looked so unreasonably pleased by the grudging compliment that I understood, with some discomfort, that I'd just made a second friend inside of a month, entirely by accident, entirely against my better judgment.
"Can I ask you something," Nadia said, packing up her folder at my kitchen table, not quite meeting my eyes, which for a woman as direct as Nadia was itself a kind of tell.
"You're going to ask regardless of what I say."
"Fair. Are you doing okay? With all of this.
Us, I mean. Showing up. Finn most of all.
I only ask because I know what it's like to have a whole family decide you're theirs before you've had a chance to agree to it.
It happened to me too, once. It's a lot, even when it's good. Especially when it's good, honestly."
I sat with that a second, surprised by the plainness of it, the lack of any agenda beneath the question.
"I don't know yet," I said, which was the truest thing I'd said to anyone in weeks. "Ask me again in a month."
"I will," Nadia said, entirely serious, and I believed her, which was its own small, unsettling revelation.
Ruth noticed before I said a word about any of it, which should not have surprised me — Ruth notices everything, has since we were kids trading vegetables for honey behind our mothers' backs — but it still landed like an ambush the Saturday she cornered me between customers with a look on her face I recognized as trouble.
"You're different," she said.
"I'm the same. I've been standing at this table since six a.m. selling the same honey I've sold for eleven years."
"You laughed at something on Tuesday. Somebody at the diner told my sister, who told me. Apparently the whole town knows by now. Hazel Dunmore, laughing. In public. Practically front-page news."
"I laugh."
"You smile, on a good day, if the light hits you right and nobody's looking too closely. This was different. This was an actual laugh. With sound."
"I don't know what you want me to say to that."
"I want you to say his name and then say something true about how you feel about him, just once, just to me, and I promise I won't tell anybody, not even my sister, who currently owes me forty dollars from a bet about whether you'd crack by summer."
"People are betting on this?"
"People have been betting on this since week two. I've got money in it myself, for the record, though I won't say which direction, because that would be unprofessional."
"Ruth."
"Hazel."
I looked at her — genuinely looked, the way you look at someone you've known since before either of you had any walls at all, back when we were eight years old trading tomatoes for honeycomb and neither of us had learned yet what the world could take from you if you let it — and something in me, tired suddenly of holding the line alone, gave half an inch.
"He's different," I said. "I don't know how else to explain it. He doesn't push. He doesn't perform. He just — shows up, and keeps showing up, and doesn't seem to need anything from me for it."
"That's called caring about somebody, Hazel. It's a normal human thing. You're allowed to have it happen to you."
"It's inconvenient."
"Love is famously inconvenient. That's not a design flaw, that's the whole point. If it were convenient it'd be a business transaction, not a feeling."
I didn't have an answer for that, so I busied myself restacking jars that didn't need restacking, and Ruth, satisfied with whatever small victory she'd claimed, went back to her tomatoes with the specific smugness of a woman who intended to collect on a bet.
Briar came last, and differently — no business reason at all, just showed up at the farmhouse door on a Thursday afternoon with a bundle of wildflowers cut from what she said was her own garden, and said, simply, "Finn said you might like these.
He also said you'd never admit it if you did, so I'm not going to ask. Just take them."